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NewsNewport Hospital to Break Ground on New Facility

By Tricia Schug

May 16, 2017

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Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport will break ground on its new hospital project, Tuesday, May 23, starting at 3 p.m., behind the hospital in the Case Street parking lot. The public is invited.

After two years of meticulous planning and design involving hospital staff, architects, construction engineers and others, the construction phase on the new three-story facility is ready to begin.

The groundbreaking comes just weeks before longtime CEO David Bigelow, PharmD, is set to retire. Having championed the project through the bond measure and strategic planning and visioning for the new hospital, he now hands over the positive momentum to his successor, Lesley Ogden, MD.

“So much of our work on the new hospital to this point has been behind the scenes, but we have been thorough in our details, ensuring that patients will receive the very best care for years to come,” said Bigelow.

This first phase of construction — the building of the new three-story facility — will take approximately 18 months. When it is complete and occupied, renovation will begin on the 1988 hospital building, and following that, the original, 1953 facility will be demolished to make room for parking. The full project is expected to be complete by the end of 2019.

“We are so excited about this new facility and what it will bring to the central Oregon Coast,” said Lesley Ogden, MD, CEO at SPCH. “We already provide excellent care here at SPCH, and this facility will allow our health care teams to reach their very highest potentials with efficient and maximized space, upgraded equipment and state-of-the-art procedure rooms. Patients are truly the ones who will benefit the most from this new facility.”

The new hospital project is made possible thanks to the generosity of Pacific Communities Health District voters, who in May 2015, approved a $57-million bond measure to build a new three-story facility and to renovate the current two-story brick structure. Samaritan Health Services has committed an additional $10-million in new medical equipment and furnishings.